From chaos to confidence: how we struggled with rapid growth and regained predictable delivery

A 45 minute Case Study by:

Jon Terry

Slides from session

About this Case Study

As a company, LeanKit has believed in lean, kanban, agile and DevOps since its founding. We've always talked about how important these ideas are - in the community and inside our company.

But that doesn't mean that doing those things in practice has been easy. We're a very fast growing start-up in a very competitive market space. We've tripled in size in less than a year and nearly came apart at the seams at times.

In fact, in the fall of 2015, our technology team was having a very hard time. We were out of synch with our sales and marketing partners and facing a lot of internal conflict.

But we came together as a team and worked hard to implement a well coordinated system of values, team structure, cadences, automation and standard practices. We're now in a much better place as a team and generating better results for our company.

There are no one-size-fits-all answers for companies. I can't promise that if you copy LeanKit you'll succeed. But we do think we have some interesting lessons learned to share and that you just might be able to pick up some ideas that you can take back to your organisation.

About the Speaker

Jon Terry is co-CEO and co-founder of LeanKit. Before LeanKit, Jon held a number of senior IT positions with hospital-giant HCA and its logistics subsidiary, HealthTrust Purchasing Group. He was among those responsible for launching HCA's adoption of lean/agile methods.

Jon earned his Global Executive MBA from Georgetown University and ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain, and his Masters Certificate in Project Management from George Washington University. He is a Project Management Professional, a Certified Scrum Master, a Kanban Coaching Professional, certified in the Lean Construction Institute's Last Planner Method, and trained in the SAFe Lean Systems Engineering method.